The Walking Dead Premiere: It’s More than Just Zombies!

Finally, a horror show on television for people who hate horror. It’s not that The Walking Dead isn’t scary or doesn’t contain gratuitous amounts of gore—it is and it does!—but, where other horror projects opt for camp, The Walking Dead grounds itself in reality. The problem with movies like The Evil Deador Dawn of the Dead is that the non-dead characters never act like actual people. Whereas in zombie parodies—Zombieland, Shaun of the Dead—the characters are smarter than the characters they’re making fun of.

It’s impossible to take any show or movie seriously when the characters do not act like rational human beings. I’m willing to accept that an extraordinary event happened—a virus that causes a fever, which then changes the victim into a zombie—because we wouldn’t be watching a show about the residents of a small Georgia town otherwise. But I also expect that the characters will respond to this one extraordinary event like any real human beings would respond. I can believe that a high school student was bitten by a radioactive spider and now has superhuman abilities (Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2), I can’t believe that a space alien also happened to land in the vicinity of the kid who was bitten by a radioactive spider (Spider-Man 3).

Rick Grimes—a small-town Georgia police officer who is one of the few survivors of a zombie outbreak—acts like a real human being.What I love about The Walking Dead is that as Grimes makes his way through a town he hardly recognizes (after a few weeks in a coma from a gunshot wound) he acts pretty much how I would act—confused and scared. Case in point: Grimes stumbles upon a door in a hospital that has a warning written on it to not, under any circumstances, open that door. In other zombie stories, that door is creaking open. In The Walking Dead, Grimes decides to heed the warning and leave the door shut. Grimes’s new friend Morgan is holed up in his house with his son, scared shitless of zombies breaking in, which seems like a reasonable reaction. In all honesty, that’s probably my role in any future zombie attack: guy who hides.

Let’s talk about the zombies. They have no real superhuman abilities and they act exactly like they should: Human beings having some really terrible fever dreams. Think about the last time you had the flu, stumbling to the kitchen for some orange juice and Benadryl—were you in any sort of condition to kill another human being? Well, neither are these zombies, especially if they are alone. A few hundred feverish flu victims stumbling toward me is just as terrifying as zombies roaming the streets.

To creator Frank Darabont’s credit, the zombies look pretty amazing, effects-wise. The legless zombie dragging itself along the ground that gets a bullet in the head is not the first (or last) zombie to get a graphic bullet to the head. There are only six episodes of The Walking Dead, but from the looks of the production, it appears that they invested the typical 13-episode budget into these six episodes.

The only scene that made me question the logic was when Grimes entered Atlanta. I have no qualms with him going to Atlanta, especially if he’s under the impression that’s where he can find help. But when he saw the traffic jam of stalled vehicles in the outbound lanes—as pictured in the promotional posters across America—shouldn’t he have gotten the hint that something might be amiss? Something that he and his poor horse and small arsenal of guns might not be able to handle? And who is Atlanta’s city planner? Opening up the inbound lanes that no one is using to outbound traffic never once crossed your mind during a zombie outbreak?

Traffic jams notwithstanding, The Walking Dead is the best new television show of the year. For those of you opposed to the horror genre, the horror is not what drives the show—it’s the human emotion in a dire situation. Horror alone is not compelling, but a realistic human reaction to horror is. A man just trying to survive, find help, and find his wife and kid—a wife who, unbeknownst to Grimes, happens to be sleeping with one of his best friends, also a survivor—is what The Walking Dead is about. Not just zombies. But if you like zombies, there are plenty of those to keep you entertained. Or on the run if you happen to be Rick Grimes, trapped in a tank in the heart of Atlanta, which is exactly where he is as we head into the second episode.

Mike Ryan is a frequent contributor to vanityfair.com. For your complaints on his opinions about The Walking Dead, you can contact him directly on Twitter.